9 de Marzo de 2005

Madeleine Albright
Well, as I mentioned earlier, I did try to overthrow our government —not very successfully. I do think that what is very important, and I agree with you about passion, that it is impossible to deal with the kind of issues that are out there today without passion, and it's positive passion of wanting to do something in humility in terms of knowing that you can't do everything but that one does have to get involved. I honestly think that our biggest problem is a definitional one. Listening to Amre here, we are kind of talking about the same thing but not really because he says double standards as a codeword for Israel and I think we need to develop a very common approach to what is a humane problem and...

Moderator
The human problem being which?

Madeleine Albright
Being poverty, repression and the fact that more than three quarters of the world feels itself disenfranchised in some form or another, and it's very hard to think about security when you are the richest people in the world, and you can't live in a neighbourhood where everybody's miserable.

Moderator
You're not saying obviously that everyone who's poor becomes a terrorist or automatically sympathises with terror, but that if you are disenfranchised, to use your term, you are more susceptible and therefore down the road from now, more likely to form one or another or join or create one or another of the groups in the insecure environment which do threaten the interests of peace and stability of everyone else?

Madeleine Albright
I think yes, but I think our problem is that we aren't fully aware of what creates terrorists. We know that some of them are ideologically motivated because they disagree with the government that they have in their country and don't like the fact that the US supported them—that's the Osama Bin Laden type. We know that there are those who feel disenfranchised in their own country, people who have an education but aren't able to get jobs so they have no dignity. Then we know that there are people, that the real recruiting ground is in the poorest places, where people are told, 'If you attack the rich man, you will have something', and our problem I think is not knowing what creates the terrorists and therefore not knowing fully how to attack it, and I agree with those and Daniel who basically said poverty is part of it, hating the people that have something you don't have, and that's why it does take passion. But to use the term we all use, it's complicated, and there is not one answer to this, and how a democracy deals with it I think is a very complex issue.

[not identified]
Well, let me just make a brief point that touches on several of the last comments, and that is that the ever-accelerating pace of globalisation raises the stakes, because on the one hand the IT revolution, economic globalisation, offers opportunities to parts of the world that have so far been excluded —been excluded from the industrial revolution, been excluded from the first IT communications revolution or information revolution; they now have the opportunity to be brought into it and ways that really weren't the case a few years ago. On the other hand, the same, the very same forces push that world—that globalised, Westernised, some would say Americanised world—ever more up in the faces of traditional societies, producing, for those who don't join in its benefits, the source of alienation, frustration, hatred that give rise to terrorist activity. It's this whole dimension that we need to get a better feel for, I think.

Moderator
You represent, for these purposes, the global financial world, right? That's the hat you put on, and you and your colleagues will go anywhere, you will sup, I put it to you, with the Devil, so long as it's not outside the law, and you do it to maximise the benefit of your shareholders. Do you accept that there is a sense in which you are totally amoral in respect of the poverty and the alienation that we face and are answerable thereby for the contribution that you—I said that you were putting on a hat, rather than you personally, obviously—that the contribution that you make to the destabilisation and the threats that flow from that that Madeleine and Daniel were talking about with such passion?

[not identified]
Personally I think that there is a strong correlation between or connection between democracy and the market economy. That's a way of actually getting rid of poverty, but we have to have a capitalism that is human, and of course there has been a lot of abuse, as we know, in the transition of economies, especially, often created because of the lack of laws and so on, robber barons if I may call them that, and that type of operation. We know that some of the global companies have not always behaved as well as they perhaps could, but I think there is--at least, I'm hoping--and I think that many companies now are understanding that and they're moving in that direction, not only the large ones that are forced by consumers in the Western world, but also smaller ones. For example, yesterday I visited a customer in the countryside of Sweden, a coffee manufacturer. They were working very actively with coffee growers in Latin America. They realise that they have to pass by the whole system and do that, and I think we will see more and more of that, I hope, that's why I think we can move in the right direction.

[not identified]
Quick thought, then.

Delegate on the floor
We have a very good example of double standards: look at the cotton problem. Because the American Bush Administration want to play safe in two states for the election, they continued to protect the cotton produced by a hundred thousand people with subventions. WTO was against it. They say free market, but they don't let it in six very poor countries in Africa. They didn't care, because it was to win two states for the next election. This is a double standard, because the free market works without subvention, but you give subventions if you want to win an election. This is democratical for United States, it's death for six African countries. This is a reality.

Moderator
You can be an adherent or an opponent of the Bush administration, but that analysis, in so far as it's true, is true of American governments back down the years, including the one of which you were a senior member.

Madeleine Albright
Well, let me explain what we did. I do think that there is no question that trade is the most complex issue in terms of American politics, it is the faultline of the Democratic Party, also, but what we had, and I'm sorry that President Clinton isn't here, because I think that you all would have enjoyed hearing him, but basically he went against the grain on this by doing NAFTA, which was criticised, and also by moving on that World Trade Organisation and bringing China into it. I do think that we need to look at the issue in a much larger way than we do in terms of what is--Benjamin Franklin said this--: “you can do well by doing good”, and the truth is that people look now about what to do about the tsunami; there are obviously needs to give people relief of some kind in terms of providing goods, but I've had discussions with some of those governments and they say what you really need to do is open up your industry so that those countries can set up there a parallel industry and sell to the United States, so I do think that the US needs to have a broader and wider system. I also would like to say I agree with the following point: I am for democratisation. I actually believe that we are all the same, that there is no such thing as Asian values that don't want democracy, because what democracy is about is the ability of people to make decisions about their own lives, and it begins with small things like deciding where you're going to live or where you go to school or what business you're going to go into and then it works its way up the system, so that's true of all of us, but you cannot have a democracy, really, without a middle class and you can't have a middle class without business, and so it's this combination of investment in emerging markets, of understanding what creates happy societies, that I think requires a cooperation north-south, east-west, and the US opening up its markets. There's no question about that.

Moderator
I haven't forgotten about you, Fernando, but I'm going to, just on this global issue, that we've moved into, just bring anyone in who wants to come in on that before we move on. Yes, there's a man here, about five rows back on the edge, with a white shirt—that doesn't help us very much, does it, seeing that about 60% are wearing white shirts? But, anyway, there we are.

Delegate on the floor
I'm from the British Institute of International and Comparative Law. I'm thinking about what you said about the need for a middle class and thinking about democracy in general and in Argentine. Twenty-three years ago when democracy came back to the country the then President said that with democracy you educated people, you fed people as well, and twenty-three years on the middle class has almost disappeared and we have thirty percent more poor than we did twenty-three years ago, so I think democracy in itself is not a wonderful thing; we still need civil society, we need strong institutions, and I just wonder what the panel thinks.

Moderator
I think Daniel missed—I missed it too—what you said. You used the term thirty percent, which I didn't quite...

Delegate on the floor
Thirty percent of people living under the poverty line, more than in 1983.

Moderator
And you say although you thought the civic society was important and democracy was good, you had a 'but', and I couldn't quite get the ...

Delegate on the floor
Well I think what I was going to say was in 1983 we were told democracy and we all jumped up and down and we thought it was wonderful and there was an open door to something wonderful and we just thought democracy itself would cure all the ills. There's more to democracy than just having elections.

Moderator
Is the gap now between those at the top and those at the bottom wider than it was then?

Delegate on the floor
Yes.

Moderator
So there's been economic growth but there's been huge disparities. I mean Argentina's got a very, a particularly...

Delegate on the floor
Yes, we had a crisis three years ago.

Moderator
Who'd like to comment on that? Yes, Robert.

Robert Hutchings
I'd like to make a broad point. I think there are some broader forces at work than just the behaviour of some governments in election year. I'm not here to defend the Bush administration. Other governments do the same thing, but there are some forces at work that, you know... the process of globalisation has the prospect of lifting lots more people out of poverty over the coming years, If you look at the trends that most economists see, global growth, the size of the global economy, will be about eighty percent larger in 2020 than it was in the year 2000. That'll benefit not only the developed world but also developing countries and those who have been excluded. That's the good news; the bad news is the way globalisation is unfolding, it looks like it's going to accentuate the gap between those who can access the global economy and those who can't. Not only in relative terms will some fall behind, but in absolute terms, as markets they thought were theirs, little niches they have carved out, that brought jobs and some degree of prosperity, are lost to China or others in this global market place who have better still workforces and are just as cheap if not cheaper in terms of the cost of production.

[not identified]
Does it flow from that in your view that you can have forms of democracy developing, but if you are excluded from a share in that increasing global wealth you can create absolutely the instabilities that lead us back to where we started this discussion in terms of disruption and support for extreme organisations and terrorism.

Robert Hutchings
I think that's right. There's a kind of paradox at work that authoritarian regimes will feel increasing pressures to democratise, but fragile, embryonic democracies will find it harder to stabilise their rule, for the reasons I just described. Now. All this does bear on terrorism.

Moderator
Fernando, on this I'm going to ask you to come in on the domestic issues.

Moderator
I want to bring you on to the way in which democracy faces the challenge of terrorism domestically, particularly in Western countries, but in other countries as well. The tension, as it were, between security, on the one hand, and civil rights, on the other, the question of whether in the urge to secure yourself more effectively you destroy what you're seeking to protect—namely, the freedom and democracy to make it worthwhile having security. In Spain, where you have experienced the horror of Madrid a year ago, international terror here, and also a long-standing domestic terrorism, do you think Spain has something to tell the rest of us about the way in which you have the balance between security and civil rights, civil liberties?

Moderator
Do people in Spain feel just as free to say what they want, write what they want? Has the law changed in any significant way, either since 9/11 or since the Madrid bombings a year ago, or the implementation of the law? Are people a little more timid, a little keener to have more security rather than to protect those hard-won civil rights and liberties?

Moderator
Thank-you. Madeleine Albright, you said at the very beginning, you talked about the impact of 9/11 on people and those who go to America sense that there is a very different mood. How do you judge that, if you detect it, that tension to be being resolved and do you draw comfort from that or does it cause you anxiety?

Madeleine Albright
Well I have tried very hard in my own mind to separate what I find irritating and a pain in the neck, frankly, when you go to airports... I have a very interesting time, because I actually am recognisable and so I stand there like this. I'm always wanted and then they say 'Can we have your autograph?', so I say 'Well, you have your choice, here'. But, basically, and then, if you're a former person like me you can never get mad because that ends up in the newspaper, but I do think that there are things that are irritating, and you put up with them because they're irritating but you do it. Then there are things that really are derogations of civil liberties and we need to distinguish those. I have recently published my book, which is for sale in Spanish, but what happened was...

Moderator [?]
(Have you got copies to sign)

Madeleine Albright
...but it meant that I spent a lot of time in the book world, and there the people were very worried about the Patriot Act, which in itself is a misnomer, and it is something that President Bush has felt very strongly about, he has called for its renewal, and the basis of so many things in it—some of them are not all bad, because it tries to get the CIA and the FBI to work together—but specifically, what it can do is, if someone is suspicious of you, they can go to the library and find out what books you've checked out or books you've bought. That is an intrusion of civil liberties. I also think that something that is corrosive to American democracy is what happened at Abu Ghraib and what's happening in Guantanamo. That is not an irritation; that is an undermining of the way that the United States sees itself as a country that abides by laws and then terrorism becomes something that contributes to ending democracy and so you have to make separations about what's happening where.

Moderator
American public opinion is, if the election is anything to go by, seems to be, despite its long history of fighting to have rights and freedom, quite susceptible to the thought that the more security is imposed, the greater the protection of liberties will be, rather than their erosion.

Madeleine Albright
I hate to say this about my fellow-Americans, but at the moment we have been traumatised and lied to, and basically our news media operate on a level of idiocy that makes you feel as if... so the more that there's a sense of fear, the more likely you are to put up with more than irritations, and so, our election, frankly, it wasn't a values question. I know that people think that, It was an issue of protection, and President Bush was somebody that stood up to protect America after 9/11 and we are being systematically told that we're a threat. You know, that's why I hesitate saying I don't feel secure, because when I say I don't feel secure it just adds to this story about 'Well, if you don't feel secure, you need different kinds of judges'.

Moderator
You're a politician. I mean this debate is very big... You were; you're liberated; you're a real person again. He's not, yet, Daniel, he's still a politician. In Britain this debate is very fierce and very intense at the moment, and the case is put by ministers sometimes that it's all very well for you to talk about civil liberties, imagine—they use the Madrid example persistently— imagine that I don't take these steps, which involve an erosion of civil liberties and the arrogation of greater power to the executive, I don't take that, and then, sometime down the road there is an atrocity as in New York or as in Madrid and I don't have to stand there as a statesman or politician and say, 'Well, I'm sorry, I've decided to put habeas corpus or civil liberties before the security of the nation, how do you respond to that? Do you have to be able to say 'I'm sorry, those civil liberties come first'?

Madeleine Albright
I think you actually do. I think in your mind you have to separate, as I said, what is necessary and what isn't in terms of protection. I was —when you made your initial remarks— I was secretary of state when our embassies were blown up in Kenya and Tanzania. Worst day of my life, certainly worst day as secretary and I brought the bodies home and I had to figure out how to protect the state department. We started putting up barriers around the department. I insisted that people carry identification just to have access. There were people who thought I'd overstepped my bounds. I did that for protection. It didn't stop anybody's civil liberties; people could still come in and say what they wanted to. But it's a hard line when you are the leader, to decide what you're doing on behalf of protecting, but in your mind you have to understand what the basis of civil liberties are in a particular country and democracies are very fragile. That's the problem. Our openness, the very openness of our system makes it difficult to make those judgements and one hopes that you have leaders who can make that decision.

[...]

Lars Thunell [?]
I just wanted to point out the connection to the financing of terrorism, of course, the money laundering and money flows—trying to identify those gets into conflict with bank secrecy laws and confidentiality related to the individual and where you keep your money. We today, all the banks in the world, are trying very hard to identify where unusual patterns of money are going, and we actually have to report those to our governments who now share the information. And that goes against civil liberties to a certain extent, of course.

Moderator
Is that, to go back to the distinction that Madeleine was seeking to make between what is irritating and what is a fundamental denial, is it irritating or is it a denial which you resent?

Lars Thunell
I think most people don't know about it and I don't think they care too much, but if you look at it from a banking point of view instead of from an ethics point of view, I think it's troublesome.

Madeleine...

Madeleine Albright
I actually would say that is only irritating, because unless you are money-laundering then there's no problem. Why shouldn't people know? Because I think that it may be irritating but it is not—for me, anyway—a derogation of your rights to speak out.

Moderator
Can I ask you specifically about the effect of measures that are taken in the name of security on minority communities: Muslim communities, Arab communities in European countries. France and Germany, for instance, obviously have this issue. What's your take on that?

Daniel Cohn-Bendit
I'll put this in a general thought. What we are discussing now [...] started with the French Revolution. The French Revolution starts with the problem of no liberty for the enemy of the liberty. This is Robespierre, this is Robespierre. And now, in the fight of terrorists, we are in the middle of this today. Who is allowed to have liberty? And I think the danger is the red line. It is a success of civilisation that in the European Union we have no death penalty any more, and I'm proud of it, and I will defend it against everybody. Everybody. It's a success of civilisation that in the European Union we have banned torture. It's easier to fight something if you torture people. Torture. And then we have the third point. Madeleine said it: Abu Ghraib, Guantámano —delocalization of torture. Take people prisoner and put them in countries where torture is not forbidden: what the CIA did. This is the end of our civilisation if we accept this. So, now we go and say—and that is the big problem--; the big problem is, 'Of course, the terrorists are Muslims'. They are safe, they are Muslim fundamentalists. So they are hiding inside the Muslim community, and of course, the Jewish, white, red-haired young man is not a Muslim, so he doesn't fear if the police are looking there, but the problem is if we want that everybody accepts civil rights, and civil rights have never been defended by the majority. It was always first a minority who started. In the United States, civil rights for the blacks: it was not the majority of the middle class who went on the streets and said they'll have equal rights; it was a minority of young people, black and white, to fight so that the biggest democracy in the world had to recognise the rights of black people in the United States. It was a big fight, it was courageous what they did. But for this, we had to defend all the Muslims who are not terrorists and to say it is not true that the Muslim is a genetical terrorist. This we have to say in our country, because the people have an easy way, they want to be protected and if I demonstrate that without any Muslims they will be better protected, then I'll buy it. I'm sorry but I'll buy it. This is the danger.

Moderator
We talked before about the extent to which people in developing countries or where there is a great deal of poverty can find themselves attracted to extreme measures. Now I don't want to make an absurd parallel, but if you go back to your own ideological conviction, a long time ago, when you were about the same age as I was, and we tried to learn as much as we could in those days, around the LSE and elsewhere in London, but, if you go back to that and look at what made you take to the streets, can you imagine today that people who are put under the spotlight in the way which you describe and you disapprove will themselves in Western communities withdraw out of life or do you think they could find themselves attracted to and more inclined internally to challenge the society that has eroded their civil rights?

Daniel Cohn-Bendit [?]
Well, you can put it like this: if you live in a country—to take an example that you know: Great Britain—where the system of health protection is going down and down for poor people, and then there came, not poor people, middle-class, high-class ideologists, terrorists, or whatever fundamentalists, and they proposed something for these people, the poor people, they saw that the big majority considered them all only as a potential terrorist but not as a potential citizen of Great Britain or United States or France or Germany, then of course a part of them can go in the direction of these ideologies. We had this with communism. Communism was exactly the same; you know, they said the world is not good—it was not good, there were a lot of poor working class--, so, the ideology is destroy capitalism. Capitalism has to give a good life for everybody. If you do this, you will have less tension; if you don't do this, you will have a lot of tension. It's very easy, very easy.

Moderator
I bet everyone wants to come in. There's someone I can see about four rows back on the edge, with glasses, yes, in this block here, very near the front. Microphones, you ran wonderfully last night. Come right down here, come down to the front, microphone. I'm sorry, I wish I knew your name, I could be more polite.

Delegate on the floor
My name is Ronald Bellington; I'm a terrorism researcher. I've been looking at how democracies can fight terrorism for the past twenty-five years, and I was in the working group on [...]. I like the discussion the way it's going and I want to bring it back to what I call the politics of fear and loathing. We just lost Hunter Thompson and I'd like to use his phrase, not just the politics of fear but the politics of hatred. And if anyone heard the plenary where the conclusions of our working groups were presented, everyone, every group, practitioners, professionals, researchers, we all exercise the rule of law, but we all recognise that government, like Madeleine Albright was saying, when she put up the barriers —I'm Canadian, by the way, and we had that problem with Parliament Hill, when we had a truck come up on Parliament Hill and we had to put up barriers, which went against a tradition, a long tradition in Canada–, but you have to make hard decisions, and you have to balance things all the time. Someone in our working group talked about three elections; I'll only mention two: Spain and the US. I think that in Spain the vote was a politics of anger, where the electorate punished a government for lying. In the US it was an election of fear. Working-class people in the Midwest voted against the Democrats, who were arguing in their interest. They went against their own interests by voting Republican, because of fear. And I think that's what happened. So my question to everyone is, it's very nice the Club of Madrid wants to come up with an agenda and I'm sure we will all exercise the rule of law. I also study torture and how people become torturers; it's easy, unfortunately. And how do democracies come forth at the Club to help the world become a safer place? Well I think that, intrinsically, picking up on Daniel Cohn-Bendit and other people, democracies, by nature, are not safe, because we are vulnerable, because we are not dictatorships. I see a kind of a problem here, and how do we deal with democracies when we know that the minute we allow torture we open a slippery slope and destroy the very democratic values the terrorists are trying to destroy.

Moderator
OK.

Delegate on the floor (Ronald Bellington)
That's the kind of question I was...

Moderator
Thank-you very much. Let's leave that question hanging, because I want to bring in one or two more, but hold it, if you want, and we can come in on that in a minute, because we're very nearly out of time, unhappily. There's a woman—many, but the one I'm looking at is three, four, five, six... yes, you're on the edge and you're nodding away knowingly, with a pink jacket. In the middle there, that's it; sorry, it's not pink; correct me if you feel necessary.

Delegate on the floor
My name is Mickey Sterne, I'm the executive director of Families of September Eleven. My husband was killed on 9/11 in the Twin Towers, and what I want to emphasise is that there's a big difference in points of view among the family members, as among many in the United States. What doesn't seem to be popular right now is nuanced thinking. That's one of the reasons I don't get interviewed any more, because I was told I was too nuanced, but I think it's an obligation of the citizens in a democracy to look for the grey area. I'm hearing so much black and white —you know: red state, blue state, black, white, it's this way, it's that way, and certainly in certain circumstances there are hard decisions to make but I'm a great believer in the third way and I think that we need to force— obligate, not force, that's the wrong word —obligate citizens to be more rigorous in terms of what they expect from their government, their representative government, and also in looking within themselves about what they react to.

Moderator
Are you—incidentally, Tony Blair would definitely interview if you are in favour of the third way, but [...] what I was going to ask you is, defining the way ahead as you would like it to be, do you believe that that is a real prospect or do you think that the black and white will continue?

Delegate on the floor
There may be a prospect if people keep talking, which is why I don't completely object to this kind reform as long as there are some concrete proposals that come out of it and it's not simply an academic exercise, but I think it takes more work, and people want to take the easy way. They want us to conquer fear and they want to be told how to feel, they want to pick something. Safety is better than tolerance or there must be a choice, and so I think we need to encourage people, including young people, that it's work that can be very enjoyable –I don't know how to put it— and necessary.

Moderator
Very briefly on that Dan, you would think, given the scale of communications is possible, that that kind of process ought to be successful, but the evidence seems to be exactly to the contrary, doesn't it?

Daniel Cohn-Bendit
Not really, because, what I find fascinating is that a lot of people who are looking for third ways—you know, nuances—are people for example from New York, and people who are never touched with fear, in Texas, are completely refusing this, so it's not the experience, the fear. Madeleine was right: America has been traumatised, but different countries or parts of America have been traumatised in a completely different way, and this we must understand, you know, because, I want to say, you can instrumentalise the poverty for terrorism, and the power can instrumentalise terrorism for another project of the world and this is not as dangerous, it's a completely difference, but this is, politically, very dangerous.

Moderator
Robert...

Robert Hutchings
Yes. As the nuanced member of the panel, maybe I can chime in here. It seems to me that framing the question of what infringements on privacy and human rights and human liberties in the name of the war on terrorism is precisely the wrong way to phrase the question, for two reasons. First, the very way of phrasing it skews the argument in favour of those who approve extreme measures, because it's a wartime question. Second, it misrepresents the nature of the challenge we face. It may or may not have been the appropriate response immediately after 9/11; it certainly is not the appropriate response now, three and a half years later. If we think of this as simultaneously a matter of ending terrorist operations against us and of engagement with a part of the world who seem to harbour hatred against us—mainly but by no means exclusively the Muslim world–, it takes you in two different directions, and let me just give you a couple of examples. For the American side, the same president who used the war metaphor to mobilise the public should now use his secure second term to mobilise public opinion in support of economic, cultural, educational engagement of this vast part of the world that we know very little about. Now, for Europeans, and I don't mean to instruct you on how to live your lives, I think it leads to a greater consciousness of the situation of second- and third-generation Muslims on this continent. They complain, not about Christianity; they complain about living in what they call a sea of secular fundamentalism in which what they consider normal religious practice is excluded because of the secular direction these societies have gone. Now this is your choice, but if European societies don't make some room for Muslim religious practice here, the funding for that religious practice will come from Saudi Arabia, not to put too fine a point on it, because of the prohibition in many countries of funding religious education.

Moderator
We just about have to stop there. Just one very brief question to you, Madeleine Albright, there are governments who say we are living in a de facto state of emergency, and against that background talk about the need to take certain measures which call into question the civil liberties of the citizens. Do you believe it's right, given the threat that's identified and is being discussed, that we should see ourselves in states living in a de facto state of emergency, or not?

Madeleine Albright
I actually think it's counter-productive to see that you're living in a de facto state of emergency, because it does allow for all kinds of measures to be taken and if you look around at dictatorships they basically don't lift their state of emergency, and so I think it is a bad thing. What one has to think about, and I'm sitting here looking at former Senator Garry Hart, who launched a study in the United States about things that made clear that there were certain measures that had to be taken within a free society to protect ourselves which were not infringements of civil liberties, so I think there are ways clearly open to societies with the globalisation issues that Bob spoke about and the increased travel, etc. We do live in a very different world, but if we start talking about things in terms of de facto states of emergency we do know from history that that has always allowed for massive measures that infringe on a particular group of people or on everybody.

Moderator
Thank you. Thank you very much. I hope that the wisdom from the floor and the wisdom from the panel will help the final document. Thank you for all the contributions that came in the form of questions. Can I ask to stay where you are, because the Mayor of Madrid, if he isn't here already, is about to be with us and is going to address us, but can you before that give a warm sense of what you feel about this lot.